Bahrain and the forgotten protests

Since February 2011 Bahrain has been gripped by political protests and while they haven't attracted the same attention as protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, they do have the potential to reshape the Gulf region . The story behind the political unrest in Bahrain.

Transcript

BAHRAIN AND THE FORGOTTEN PROTESTS

Transcript for Rear Vision 01 December 2012

Simon Santow, AM (archival): Despite a government ban, thousands of Bahrainis took to the streets…

Barbara Miller, AM (archival): In the Gulf kingdom Bahrain, the deaths of two protesters earlier in the week have fuelled more demonstrations. Large crowds turned out for the funeral of one of the men…

Annabelle Quince: The protests that swept the Gulf state of Bahrain in February and March 2011 didn’t attract the same international attention as those in Egypt, Libya or Tunisia. The protests in Bahrain, however, were proportionally larger and did result in a regional intervention—but not one to assist the protesters, as in Libya.

Hello, this is Rear Vision on RN and the web. I’m Annabelle Quince and today the story of Bahrain and the forgotten uprising.

To understand Bahrain today you need to understand where it is geographically and its importance to the other Gulf States. Brian Dooley is from Human Rights First, a Washington-based NGO.

Brian Dooley: So, Bahrain is the smallest country in the Middle East. It’s about 10 or 15 miles across and it’s perched just off the coast of Saudi Arabia in a very sensitive spot in the Strait of Hormuz, which means on one side there is Iran, on the other side Saudi Arabia. And the oil that comes from Saudi has to pass through the strait and therefore past Bahrain. And the US Navy has based its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. So its size really doesn’t give much indication of how important it is. It’s looked at intensively by the US, by Saudi Arabia, by Iran, and it’s really at this nexus of geopolitical strife.

Michael Schmidmayr: Well, Bahrain is a small island in the Persian Gulf. It’s part of the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, which has six members: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the UAE and Qatar.

Annabelle Quince: Michael Schmidmayr, associate director for international relations at the French-German Institute for Political Science in Paris. He spoke to me via Skype.

Michael Schmidmayr: The generally admitted view is that there’s roughly 70 per cent of Shiites and 30 per cent of Sunnis. It’s basically a Muslim country. There are small other minorities, which actually don’t really count here. The important divide is really the one between the Sunnis and the Shia. Now, these two groups are not homogeneous, either. On the one side, the Shia, there are some of them who are Arabic-speaking—that’s the original population of the island—and then there are others who speak Persian, or who used to speak Persian in the past. And on the other side, on the Sunni side, they do all speak Arabic today, but some of them also came from Persia, from Iran, from today’s Iran some decades ago.

Now, although the majority are Shia, the ruling family is Sunni and that actually produces, or that is actually accountable for quite a couple of current problems the country is facing.

Annabelle Quince: And economically where does it get its money from? Is it like a number of the other Gulf States? Is it very wealthy in oil and gas?

Michael Schmidmayr: Bahrain was the first country where oil was found and extracted, but today it gets financial resources from oil refineries and also gets granted subsidies from Saudi Arabia, which actually grants them the income of one oilfield, which is under Saudi possession. If we look at the Bahrain economy it’s still heavily based on natural resources, but it’s much less dependent on them than are, for instance, Qatar or Kuwait.

Annabelle Quince: For most of the twentieth century Bahrain was administered by Britain, with the help of the ruling family. Maryam Al-Khawaja is the acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and the deputy director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights.

Maryam Al-Khawaja: The Al-Khalifa family actually took over Bahrain about 230 years ago and they’ve been ruling Bahrain by force since then. And one of the ways that they’ve been able to stay in power was by becoming a British protectorate. So, for example, in the 1950s there was an uprising that was quelled by the help of the British, who actually entered Bahrain and helped arrest some of the leaders of that uprising.

So the British left in 1971 and one of the good things they did was that they left a constitution that actually gave the people of Bahrain a real parliament.

Michael Schmidmayr: That constitution was modelled after the Kuwaiti one. It’s kind of a power-sharing agreement in the sense that it was not a full-fledged legislature. Part of the parliament, the majority part of the parliament, was to be elected but then there were also members of parliament which were ministers. So in their quality as ministers they were also members of parliament, which actually gave the government some kind of influence in legislature.

That kind of power-sharing deal worked for a short time, from 1973 to 1975. What happened then is that the three major factions that were represented there, increasingly working together, built up an alliance which was against the ruling family. And at that point, when the emir realised that three factions actually could threaten his legitimacy and the existence of the current system, he dissolved parliament and then he also suspended the constitution and then that constitution remained suspended until 2001.

Annabelle Quince: According to Hasan Al Hasan, a Bahrain-based economist and political analyst, there were two main areas of dispute between the emir and the parliament. The first was the introduction of a new and expanded security law, and the second, an extension of the contact for the US Naval base in Bahrain.

Hasan Al Hasan: Well, at the time there were a few disputes, one of which was the state security law that the government wanted to put in place, which was supposed to give the security forces an extended mandate to apprehend and arrest. In the 1970s there was fear of underground political movements coming in from Iraq and other parts of the Arab world, which were thought to—and probably rightly so—to endanger the security of the Bahraini states at the time.

And there was another dispute that consisted in the parliament not wanting to renew the contract for the presence of the American naval forces in Bahrain. And I think that this is something that the emir and the government probably did not think themselves wanting to do. So when things came to a standstill with parliament and positions became so entrenched, I think the emir saw no solution but to dissolve the parliament in 1975.

(Music)

Michael Schmidmayr: From 1975 to 2001, basically the country was ruled under the emergency law and during that period there was no parliamentary activity whatsoever.

Annabelle Quince: And was there protests through the ‘80s and ‘90s against that, and a kind of push to reintroduce some kind of democratic participation?

Michael Schmidmayr: Yeah, definitely. In the ‘80s protests were actually quite low-scale, because the regime actually managed to oppress any kind of attempt like this. And also, under the impression of the Iranian Islamic revolution I think they could basically draw on other powers for support, so they managed to keep the potential for rebellion very low. In the ‘90s things gradually changed under the impression of the downfall of the Soviet order in Eastern Europe, which actually brought about this kind of wave of democratisation. And the other major element was definitely the liberation of Kuwait, which re-established a semi-democratic regime in Kuwait, and under that impression the Bahraini opposition got more and more vocal.

They started with petitions to the emir—first of all it was an elite petition and then followed by a popular petition. And at that point—that was in 1994—the opposition forces, which were mainly Islamist, kind of predecessors of today’s major Islamist party, Al Wefaq, those opposition activists clashed with security forces. And then from 1994 to 1998, 1999, there was what is called the Bahraini Intifada, or one of the Bahraini Intifadas, so an uprising which caused dozens of dead and definitely was not on the same scale as the famous Palestinian Intifada, but it was something. And for five years the political life came to a standstill in the sense that everything that was to be discussed was discussed by violence.

Annabelle Quince: The Bahraini Intifada come to an end in 1999, when the old emir—who had ruled Bahrain since independence—died. He was succeeded by his son, who promised to open up political dialogue in Bahrain.

Brian Dooley: Well, what was interesting about that was that the response was that ‘Yes, OK, you have some legitimate demands here and this is going to be a new chapter in Bahraini history.’ What people were looking for in the late-’90s was some form of power sharing of, say, in how the government was run. And by the end of the late-’90s, going into 2000 and 2001, there was some outreach made to political exiles, many of whom had been exiled in the ‘80s and ‘90s, to say, ‘Look, come back. It’s going to be different now. There’s going to be reforms. We want you to be part of a new Bahrain which is going to start a sincere journey towards democracy.’ And so you had some very prominent dissidents going back to Bahrain. You had the opening of an opposition newspaper, which was allowed within limits to criticise the government. And I think by the early 2000s, really—the year 2000, 2001 and 2002—there was some real optimism that things were going to be different.

(Music)

Annabelle Quince: You’re listening to Rear Vision on RN and via the web. I’m Annabelle Quince and today we’re taking a look at the Gulf State of Bahrain.

The new emir created a National Action Charter, which promised a constitutional monarchy with an elected lower chamber of parliament and an independent judiciary. The charter was overwhelmingly supported by the people of Bahrain in a referendum in 2001.

But when the emir released the new constitution in 2002, it wasn’t quite what Bahrainis expected.

Maryam Al-Khawaja: What happened in 2002 is that he unilaterally changed the constitution of Bahrain, making himself the highest command in the country, the head of all the different institutions of government. He reappointed his uncle as prime minister; he’s now been prime minister for 42 years, I believe. And he turned Bahrain into an actual monarchy. He created a parliament, but the parliament has no legislative or monitoring powers. And so he did good on some of his promises but the main promise, of a constitutional monarchy, was never delivered.

Michael Schmidmayr: And one of the most important changes that it introduced was it created a bicameral parliament with two chambers. And the first chamber was an elected chamber; the second one is an appointed chamber. And those two chambers are equal. So in a certain way, if we compare the situation of 1973, of the 1973 constitution, and that of the 2002 constitution, the opposition was actually worse off in 2002 in the sense that in parliament, the king was always able to block any attempt by the opposition, even if it had a majority in one of the chambers, by using the other chamber; whereas back in 1973 the government part in parliament was a minority compared to the elected members of parliament.

Annabelle Quince: And so what was the response of the opposition to the king declaring himself a king and to creating this new constitution that put forward two chambers of parliament as opposed to one?

Michael Schmidmayr: Well, actually the fact that Hamad became king was not a contested thing, it was not part of the… It’s not the key issue here. I think the opposition could accept him becoming a king. The more important issue is really the question of the two parliament chambers, and also other tiny elements of the new constitution, and also the fact that that constitution was not approved by popular vote or was not set up by an elected constitutional assembly but by a committee which was appointed by the king and then the king just promulgated that constitution. So in terms of legitimacy of that constitution that was also definitely one point of argument between the opposition and the government, or the king.

The reaction was, I would say, there were two different strategies that came out of this. The first strategy would be to participate in the system anyways, and some of the opposition forces did so. So they ran for elections, they ran in the elections and they ran for seats, but actually were basically defeated.

On the other side, the majority part of the opposition actually decided to not participate as long as the constitution was not revised. And so for about four years, from 2002 to the end of 2005, there was the so-called boycott alliance of four major political parties, both Shia Islamists and secular forces, who actually decided not to run in the elections. And so they stayed outside parliament and conducted what could be called the street politics, so with massive demonstrations in favour of constitutional reform. Also they organised conferences, they tried to voice their concerns and their demands, both domestically and internationally. But in the end, the outcome was rather meagre, and in 2006 they eventually decided to run in the elections because they had realised that their strategy had not actually been successful.

(Music)

Hasan Al Hasan: I think undoubtedly if you compare the situation in Bahrain in the 1990s with Bahrain post-the 2002 constitution and elections, it is hardly recognisable politically speaking. All of the exiles were allowed to return, political prisoners were released, and the opposition were able to set up their own newspaper for the first time. Bahrain suddenly was transported to the forefront, I think, of democratic transformation in the 2000s, thanks to these reforms.

In parliament we’ve had several very strong or powerful instances of cooperation between different factions within the parliament who… we’ve had very powerful report on land corruption, on other instances of corruption, and so on. So I think that the reforms have had a great effect on the political landscape of Bahrain. I think… I do not think it would be fair for anyone to say that the reforms created a less democratic Bahrain. Certainly they created a more democratic Bahrain.

Brian Dooley: Bahrain will still insist that compared to some of its immediate neighbours, those reforms were huge leaps. And they’re justified in that; you know, things compared to Saudi Arabia or compared to Iran really did take great strides towards democracy and power sharing in Bahrain. But still overall, when you compare it to the international standards and the sorts of things they ought to be meeting, it’s still pretty slow.

Government officials in Bahrain will remind people—again with justification—that they made great strides over the last decade, and before that, in the area of women’s rights. So compared to Saudi, of course, where women aren’t allowed to vote or drive or do many of the basic things, in Bahrain it’s very different: women police officers, women are allowed to vote, women are in the upper chamber of the parliament there, the first women’s school in the gulf. And so, comparatively, Bahrain has been progressive on some of these issues. But when you compare it to its immediate neighbours of Iran or Saudi that’s not a very high bar for it to meet.

Annabelle Quince: Bahrain has a population of about 1.1 million, half of which are nationals and the other half expats.

The protests began on 14 February 2011 and within days hundreds of thousands of people were on the streets. It’s estimated that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Bahraini nationals took part in the protests.

Ali, Foreign Correspondent (archival): It actually started with social media. We agreed on a certain date. I mean, 14th of February is just a date that people agreed to go out and ask for their rights and reform.

Maryam Al-Khawaja: What’s important about this uprising in Bahrain is that it was led by the youth. And the second thing is that at the very beginning when they initiated the invitation for a protest in Bahrain, they made it very clear that their demands were about reform, their demands were about the constitution, and their demands were not actually to do with any political society or organisation and it wasn’t affiliated to any religious group. And so that’s why when they did take to the streets and people started joining, you saw people from all parts of society actually join the protests in Bahrain.

The Bahraini population is about 600,000 people—between 600,000 and 700,000. And you compare it to the other mass protests in the other countries that witnessed the same kind of uprisings; for example, in Egypt, you have a population of about 80 million people and the amount of people almost who took part in the uprising in Egypt was approximately a million. In Bahrain you had almost 50 per cent of the population taking part in the protests. So you had in one protest almost 300–400,000 people out on the streets in one protest. Imagine if you had 40 million Egyptians coming out to the streets to make demands. This is basically what Bahrain witnessed.

Peter Cave, AM (archival): Good morning, this is AM; I’m Peter Cave. On the program today, at least three dead in Bahrain as another Middle East nation explodes in protest.

Trevor Bormann, Foreign Correspondent (archival): This is where Ali and his social media mobilisers led their people, to the iconic Pearl roundabout. At first their demands were modest: a more representative parliament and a clampdown on corruption. But their restraint was met with a heavy hand and the first protestors would die as the roundabout was cleared.

Brian Dooley: Well, the government and I think most of the population were shocked. Both the protestors and the government were really astonished by the size of the protests. I don’t think anyone had really bargained for such huge numbers. The immediate reaction of the government was a reflexive one of violence, to shoot some of the protesters.

Sheik Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa (translated): I express my condolences to all Bahrainis because of the painful days that we are living through. I would like to address them with a message…

Brian Dooley: The government then realised that the whole country had been put into a sort of a paralysis by this action. Everybody took a step back and a deep breath and the king’s son, the crown prince, who’s reputedly the reformer of the family—but remember all of this is relative—went on television and said, ‘Look, people were shot, but from now on it’s OK. You can go back to the Pearl Square and you can demonstrate again and you have the right under the Bahrain constitution to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression,’ and so on. And so people went back then with this assurance from the crown prince that it was OK to demonstrate.

Journalist (archival): Well, this is Pearl Square in the centre of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, and what an incredibly different place it is to Tahrir Square in Cairo. It is just so much more well organised. Now, remember it was only just a few days ago that the police came in here and killed people. They’ve since retreated and what has moved in is all sorts of tents; there are all sorts of food stalls available, medical help.

Brian Dooley: In the following weeks, then, the second half of February-first half of March, the royal family and the ruling class, they really began to… panic, I suppose, isn’t an overstatement. They saw the crowds becoming larger and larger. It became really an existential threat to them.

Some of the protesters who had started off asking for fairly moderate reform now felt that they could ask for something much more, became much more ambitious. There were calls for a republic, for the end of the rule by monarchy, and of course as those calls became more ambitious, the more scared the ruling family became and also the more nervous the Saudi Arabian government became. Saudi kept a very close eye on what was happening to Bahrain. Bahrain is just the island off of Saudi—it’s actually joined by a bridge—and Saudi was very nervous at the prospect of an overthrow or even a radical reform of the Bahrain government. And so it sent in about a thousand troops in the middle of March and really that was the end of the protests.

Maryam Al-Khawaja: The Saudi government used Bahrain, you know, as their backyard. And a lot of the GCC countries are worried that if the Bahraini monarchy falls or if Bahrain witnesses real reforms and does become a constitutional monarchy, then it would have a ripple effect and that it would be the beginning of the end of all of these absolute monarchies in the gulf countries.

And so what happens is, where we saw military intervention in Libya to help the people against the dictator, we saw also a military intervention in Bahrain, but it wasn’t to help the people; it was a military intervention in the form of the Peninsula Shield, which is the military group that was set up by the GCC countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, that came into Bahrain to help the regime put down the protest. And Saudi Arabia made it very clear internationally that this was their backyard and no one was supposed to get involved. And that’s why you don’t see the same international response towards Bahraini human rights violations the way you see in other countries. And this is of course a huge problem, these double standards that we’re witnessing internationally towards human rights violations in different countries in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Brian Dooley: Since March, the middle of March, when the troops went in and there was a very violent crackdown, thousands of people arrested and many of those tortured, several people tortured to death in custody, then you had between March and October a military court convened to try hundreds of civilians who were associated or alleged to be associated with the protests. Meanwhile the king of Bahrain took a very unusual, and you have to say brave step in appointing an outside body of commissioners to sort out the rumour from the facts of what had happened there in February, March, April and so on, headed by the international human rights lawyer, Egyptian-American Cherif Bassiouni.

He reported to the king in November and said, ‘Look, what these other human rights organisations are saying is basically true. You had all these people arrested, you did have a pattern of torture, yes there were people who were tortured to death in custody, yes you had thousands of people dismissed from their work on the basis of their sect because they’re Shia.’ The government was pretty stunned to be told by its own commission the extent of what had happened. And it promised to reform. It promised to implement the recommendations in this Bassiouni report. And that was a year ago and the reform that it promised really hasn’t been delivered. And so over the last year you’ve seen growing frustration from people in Bahrain.

Michael Schmidmayr: There are two major kinds of opposition forces. The one is the older opposition force, which is a mixed force, so there are basically two or three parties which are non-sectarian, which have Sunnis and Shia in their ranks. So in these groups there is no divide along sectarian lines.

On the other side, there are Shia Islamist forces, basically two major groups—Al Wefaq and also Al Amal al-Islāmī, the Islamic Action Society—and in these two groups, it’s definitely Shiia dominated. That does not exclude Sunnis from being members, but they are not prominent members and there are only few of them. So in this category we can definitely say that the separation the divide runs along sectarian lines.

Brian Dooley: So when the latest protest began, one of the common slogans, the common chants, was ‘Neither Sunni nor Shia but Bahraini.’ And that was certainly true; there were many Sunnis who were involved in the protests and including some of the political leadership was Sunni. But by and large most of the country who are particularly disenfranchised—we’re talking probably 60-plus per cent of the country are Shia and they’ve been excluded from, discriminated against entry into many government jobs. They’re really not to be seen in the security forces or in the upper reaches of the government at all.

There has been a traditional grievance on the part of the Shia community that’s gone on for generations, which is now certainly a strong part of what’s happening today. But it would also be wrong and an oversimplification of things to describe this as a Sunni versus Shia tension, although that’s often how it’s portrayed. And I think it plays into the government’s hands to present it as a sectarian issue, whereas really at root it’s one about those who have the power and those who don’t.

Maryam Al-Khawaja: Well, the protests haven’t stopped in Bahrain. Since the 14th of February 2011, there have been protests almost every single day. And it’s not just one or two protests; there are protests in several areas almost on a daily basis. The situation is not sustainable. Even if the Bahraini regime continues to get support from GCC countries and from the west, it’s still not going to be sustainable. The economy’s on the line, the situation is not stable and it’s only going to continue to deteriorate. I think that change is going to come to Bahrain, but it’s only a matter of when. It’s either going to happen a lot quicker and with a lot less bloodshed if we see real international pressure happen to stop the human rights violations in Bahrain. If that doesn’t happen it’s going to take a lot longer and it’s going to be a lot bloodier and a lot more violent. And I hope that it doesn’t take that for the world to realise that they really need to do something about the human rights violations in Bahrain.

Annabelle Quince: Maryam Al-Khawaja, acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. My other guests were Brian Dooley from Human Rights First, Bahrain-based economist and political analyst, Hasan Al Hasan, and Michael Schmidmayr, associate director for international relations at the French-German European Institute for Political Science in Paris.

The sound engineer is Phil MacKellar. I’m Annabelle Quince and this is Rear Vision on RN. Thanks for joining us.

Guests

Maryam Al-Khawaja

Acting President Bahrain Centre for Human Rights and the Deputy Director of the Gulf centre for Human Rights.

Michael Schmidmayr

Associate Director for International Relations at the French German European Institute for political Science in Paris.

Hasan Alhasan

Bahrain based economic and political analyst.

Brian Dooley

Human Rights First a Washington based NGO.

Credits

Presenter

Annabelle Quince

Comments (1)

Ghali :

09 Dec 2012 9:41:51am

When you listen to Rear Vision or any other ABC program, you feel hopeless; the truth is masked to manipulate you. The brutality of the regime in Bahrain is completely ignored. The so-called “experts" are the regime’s complicit in the crimes.

Let's see when Rear Vision has a program on Syria. The Syrian Government and the people of Syria will be demonised and persecuted to justify Western violence. It is fascist propaganda in the open.